Kayaking Safety - The EssentialsWatch this short video to learn how youcan insure that your paddling experiencewill be relatively safe for all involved.Training Canoe Newbies Over the years, Cliff Jacobson has formed afew tests to get new canoeists ready to run whitewater rivers. Read all about them.

Once upon a time, and not too long ago at that,
many country folk thought that chipmunks migrated to warmer climes when winter
arrived. It was a reasonable conclusion. As the days got shorter and nights
grew colder, the little ground squirrel's spirited "Chip!" vanished from the
woods and fields, and no striped sentinels stood watch on moss-covered stone
walls or river banks. The frozen world brooded in lonely silence, waiting for
warmer days. Then, months later, as the snow retreated, the chatty watchers
reappeared, joining the high-flying geese in heralding the return of the sun to
the north. Soon the news was on everyone's tongue: "The chipmunks have come
back!" And people marvelled at the wonder of their great, unseen migration.

This wasn't what really happened, of course. The chipmunks couldn't "come
back." They'd never left. Chipmunks are homebodies. They don't pack up and head
south when winter closes in. They hunker down, instead, retreating to their
burrows and curling up on thick beds of dried, shredded leaves. While we humans
shiver and slide and shovel, the chipmunks sleep soundly, untroubled by the
need to go places and do things. A time to every purpose, they seem to
say.

Maybe they know something. After all, chipmunks have
been around for 35 million years, give or take the odd million. That's a
lot longer than we have, and they've learned a thing or two in the process.
When the days grow short, their bodies tell them it's time to turn in. And they
do. Funnily enough, humans often feel the need to nest up through the long
winter months, too. We stay in bed till the last possible minute, yawn through
the workday, and then doze fitfully after dinner, waking up only to go to bed
again. But for all that, we've lost the knack of sleeping through the season.

We make the best of it. We party, for one thing. Midwinter festivals
enlivened the long northern nights from earliest times, and they remain
important today. Or we join the geese in their southward trek, following along
in wide-body jets and Winnebagos. Or if we must stay at home, we revisit our
summertime haunts, skiing or
snowshoeing through the white drifts that now disguise familiar landscapes.
And we  we paddlers, that is  wait, patiently or impatiently,
according to our temperament and inclination. Wait for the spring of the
waters.

But spring won't be returning to the Adirondack hills anytime soon. The
temperature's in the single digits, and wind-driven snow is lapping over the
window sills. So let's pull our snowshoes down from the wall and go for a
stroll.

A few minutes later, and we're walking along the River, through a woods that
bears the scars of a century of catch-as-catch-can logging, not to mention a
recent ice-storm. The naked branches of maple, ash, oak, and birch are
silhouetted against a milky-white sky, but it's not a monochrome landscape.
Copper-tinted leaves cling stubbornly to the many beeches, and islands of green
identify stands of hemlock and cedar. Looking down at our feet, we see the
footprints of a galloping gray squirrel that crossed the trail earlier. No
sleepy-head, he (or she). While his striped cousins drowse away the winter in
their underground burrows, the gray ghost makes do with tree holes, and forages
daily for half-remembered caches of nuts and seeds. It's a hard life, and a
busy one.

Meanwhile, the chipmunks slumber on, subsiding into a chilly torpor not too
far removed from the last stages of hypothermia.
But the chipmunk's torpor is a hypothermia with a difference: it is
life-giving, rather than life-threatening. Bears, too, sleep through the cold
months, though their winter quarters may be no more elaborate than a hollow
under a sheltering spruce. Unlike bears, however, chipmunks don't "bulk up" in
the fall. They store their winter food in their burrows, rather than on their
bodies. Then they drowse fitfully, waking now and then to snack. Is the
chipmunks' long, interrupted sleep really hibernation? Not according to most
biologists. Then again, few biologists agree on what exactly constitutes "true"
hibernation. Naturalist Lawrence Wishner may have the best solution. He speaks
of "restless hibernation." That's probably the best approach.

Bears aren't true hibernators, either. At least that's the view of most (but
not all) biologists. Like the chipmunk, bruin also wakes from time to time.
Female bears even give birth in their dens. But theirs is a hungry winter. They
don't eat. This has obvious consequences. Though bears do it in
the woods in summer, they don't do it at all in winter. That can't be very
comfortable, and chipmunks  who snack throughout the long winter months
 certainly can't put off attending to nature's call till spring. But as
anyone who's watched a chipmunk groom herself knows, they're also fastidious
creatures. What's the answer? Simple. Chipmunks build en suite toilets
adjacent to, yet apart from, their sleeping chambers. In the chipmunks' tidy
and well-ordered world, there really is a place for
everything.

Continuing along the trail, we pass a recent overflow and spot the
disconcertingly human handprints of a racoon in the now-frozen mud alongside
the River. Like the gray squirrels, racoons are active throughout winter,
though they've been known to doze in their tree-hole or rock-crevice dens for
several days when the weather's really awful, surviving on stored fat. The
River beckons, but it's too cold for us to stand and watch the icy mist roll up
over the lip of Curtain Falls. We move on, instead. Soon we've left the River
behind us and are skirting a meadow. As our snowshoes carve a wavering path
through the powder, woodchucks slumber soundly under our feet. While their
smaller cousins the gray squirrels must forage constantly though the winter
months, we won't see any woodchucks out and about till long after Groundhog
Day. They waddle fat and happy into their burrows in the fall, only to emerge
as skinny shadows of their former selves in spring, wakened from a deathlike
sleep by some as yet unknown internal summons. "Deathlike" is no rhetorical
flight of fancy, by the way. A hibernating woodchuck's heart beats no more than
four or five times a minute.

But the winter fields aren't slumbering. The new fallen snow has traces of
active, questing life. Scores of tiny prints like miniature squirrel tracks
wind circuitously between rotting logs and weedy tussocks, often disappearing
into tunnels beneath the snow. White-footed
mice and meadow voles don't sleep through the winter, and although they
build up some fat in anticipation of the hungry months, they've still got to
work constantly to gather enough food to keep their internal fires burning
bright. Their tunnels  some are hollowed out of the snow; some woven from
the stalks of meadow grasses  make it easier, offering secure highways
between nests and food stores, safe from the pitiless eyes of roving predators.
On the coldest nights, these protected ways are opened to all, and mice,
normally the least sociable of creatures, congregate in chambers lined with
shredded bark, huddling together for warmth and even exchanging places so that
everyone gets to spend time in the cozy center.

Our trail now turns back toward the woods. The thick forest duff buried deep
under the snow furnishes a rich foraging ground for hungry creatures like mice,
in addition to providing shelter for overwintering toads. Cold-blooded in fact
as well as name in winter, toads survive the coldest months in something not
far removed from suspended animation, protected from freezing by a sort of
biological antifreeze. Far above their solitary, slumbering forms, colonies of
hibernating bats roost upside down in tree cavities and under loose bark,
waiting for the return of warm weather.

Suddenly, the trail ends at an iced-over pond, where a blanket of snow
insulates a beaver family's
lodge. The pug marks of a coyote circle
the lodge again and again, but it's obvious that the coyote left hungry. The
thick walls of the lodge are all but impregnable  the only entrance opens
into the near-freezing water beneath the ice. This is no obstacle to the
beavers, though. They go and come all winter, an invisible but active presence
in a frozen world, fetching fresh branches from their underwater larder and
endlessly patrolling the dam that keeps them safe. As the beavers swim home
with their dinner in their jaws, they pass above turtles and frogs, buried in
the ooze at the bottom of the pond, just like their terrestrial kin entombed
alive in the duff of the forest floor. And like the toads, the turtles and
frogs also wait for the returning sun to free them from their chilly prison.

But that day is not yet come.

We're back indoors now. It's night. Outside, a freshening breeze sculpts the
newest drifts. Inside, a fire crackles in the hearth, and we cradle mugs of hot
cocoa in our hands. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't feel like
clearing the ice from the eaves or shoveling the path by lanternlight. I just
feel sleepy. It certainly would be nice to hibernate. Or at least to
have the choice. And maybe some of our remote ancestors did. There's evidence
to that effect inscribed in our genes, at any rate. Of course, we've lost the
knack today. But the chipmunks haven't. Along with many others, they sleep
soundly beneath the snow. Waiting. Waiting for spring.